Views from the front (yard) on Memorial Day Weekend

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

June 20 is the official first day of summer, but this weekend marks the unofficial start. It is often a time for picnics, barbeques or get-togethers with friends and family.

Traditionally, Memorial Day was called Decoration Day. It was on May 30, a day set aside to honor fallen soldiers from the American Civil War. The graves of soldiers were usually decorated with flowers. When I was growing up, my grandmothers still called it Decoration Day. But today we know it as Memorial Day, and it has expanded to honor veterans of all wars, and fallen family members as well. It now falls on the last Monday of the month to give us a three-day weekend.

This is my newest raised bed, the little box in back at the lower level. It is a mere 2 ft x 3 ft. I call it the pumpkin patch because this year I am going to attempt to grow pumpkins in it.

Most people have their gardens in by now, but I’m still working on planting mine. I just built a new raised bed a couple of days ago, a tiny one that I call the pumpkin patch. I planted 3 Queensland Blue pumpkins and 3 Rouge Vif d’Etampes pumpkins. They are also known as Cinderella Pumpkins because the fairy godmother is said to have turned this type of French pumpkin into a marvelous pumpkin coach. They are flattish, vivid red pumpkins, a French heirloom, and are said to have been served at the second Thanksgiving dinner in the Plymouth Rock colony in Massachusetts in 1623. Rouge Vif means vivid red in French.

My granddaughter Megan picked out a real beauty at Trader Joes last year for Halloween, and I saved seeds from it. I planted 6 seeds that I will thin to three plants, hoping to get at least 3 Rouge Vif d’Etampes pumpkins, one for each little granddaughter.

I saved the Queensland Blue pumpkin seeds from one that I ate about 5 years ago. These are Australian heirloom pumpkins that made it to this country in the 1930s. They have the toughest, hardest rinds of any pumpkin that I’ve ever encountered. You almost need power tools to cut them in half. The seeds are awesomely thick and would probably made great pepitas (roasted pumpkin seeds). I might try that if I get any pumpkins from these seeds.

But my goal is one each blue pumpkin for the girls in addition to a red one. This is going to be a challenge, because I have yet to successfully grow a pumpkin in my front yard.  I did grow a tiny New England pie pumpkin in the back, so it should be possible. My plan is to let the vines sprawl all over the yard outside the box.

This is a view of my former Garden of Infinite Neglect as seen from the street looking toward my house. The new pumpkin patch is on a lower level at the back left of this garden.

Former Garden of Infinite Neglect and current raised bed as seen looking south.

Former Garden of Infinite Neglect as seen looking to the north.

Sorry about the unattractive bags of steer manure and potting soil, but I have one more raised bed to build before I will be done with this section. Then I can weed the Garden of Perpetual Responsibility. Again.

If I back up a bit more from where the previous photo was taken, I can see the row of fabric Gro-pots in the driveway. I have two eggplants, a newly planted pot of yams, a pot of what are most likely blue potatoes (although they could be German butterballs or even Russets–there is a lot to be said for labeling things when they are planted, huh?), and two more pots of yams.

This is the Garden of Perpetual Responsibility. It needs weeding, of course. The artichokes are done, and it is now mostly a butterfly garden.

I grow a few strawberries in a strawberry pot that sits on the brick border of the Garden of Perpetual Responsibility. I also grow ginger, horseradish and green onions in containers on this ledge.

The “Power That Is” in the household says that we have to get ready to go enjoy a Memorial weekend party with friends.

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How to Make Yummy Borscht (Russian Cabbage and Beet Soup)

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

I had  a couple of beets pop up in a pathway, volunteers from a Chioggia beet that is now two years old. I’m growing the parent beet for entry in the Orange County Fair’s largest beet competition this year. I have yet to win a blue ribbon in that category, and second place is where my beets usually land.

I let two of my Chioggia beets overwinter twice now, and if they’re not the largest ones at the fair this year I’ll eat my hat. They are MONSTERS!

Chioggia beet

But their two offspring are cute little guys and quite edible. I am refurbishing that section of the pathway and one of the beets was the perfect size for harvesting. I pulled them both to make borscht with my last head of red cabbage.

There are a zillion ways to make borscht, which is a highly adaptable cabbage and beet soup from Russia. You can leave out the meat for a vegetarian version, or add more beef.

I like to use small amounts of meat in my cooking. It’s not quite vegetarian, but it’s better for you and the environment than consuming 8 oz of meat or more per meal. It takes a lot of water to raise meat animals, and it is more energy efficient for us to eat grains than it is to feed grains to meat animals and then eat them. We eat meat about once every six meals, and even then not a lot, so I call us semi-vegetarians.

Here’s how I make borscht. I had fewer than three beets and more than six carrots and only enough room left in the solar cookware pan for half a head of cabbage. Doesn’t matter.

For this recipe, I used beets, garlic, and bay leaves from my garden. The onion and carrots were from the farmer’s market. I cooked it in the solar oven, but the recipe should work equally well in a crockpot. You may need more liquid if you cook this on the stove.

This is a start of making borscht. I took the photo before I had the cabbage ready.

Borscht (makes 6-8 servings)

1 large onion, diced

2-3 cloves of garlic, crushed

3 beets, peeled and cubed

3 leafy beet tops, washed and sliced

6 carrots, scraped and sliced

1.5 lbs chuck roast cut into cubes (or stew beef)

1 head of cabbage, sliced

1/2 C red wine

1- 10.5 oz can beef bullion

2 bay leaves

Place all ingredients in a pot, adding the liquid last, cover and cook in a preheated solar oven for about 4 hours or until beef is tender. Serve in bowls and top with sour cream. A dark pumpernickel rye bread goes great with borscht. Borscht can be served hot or cold.

If you used any of your harvest this week, fresh or preserved, visit Robin at The Gardener of Eden to see how others are using their harvests.

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How to make great strawberry jam

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

Oh how I wish that these strawberries were from my own garden. But they’re not. They’re farmer’s market strawberries. My entire strawberry harvest this week went onto a bowl of cereal this morning. I can only dream of the day when I might have enough of my own berries to make preserves. But the lemon that went into the jam was my own.

While strawberries are in abundance at farmer’s markets, why not try making your own jam? It’s surprising easy, a lot cheaper than store bought jam, and there is no high fructose corn syrup or mystery ingredients.

Strawberry Preserves (makes 6 cups)

4 C strawberries

4 C white sugar

micrograted peel and juice from one lemon

Step 1 is to start your boiling water bath as it takes a while for all of that water to come to boiling.You need a pan that is deep enough to hold all of the jars standing up, and still have an inch of water over the tops of the lids.

I cut the berries into quarters. Some people like to leave them whole. While the berries, sugar and lemon juice are cooking, I wash the canning jars and lids. I boil the lids and rings for five minutes to sterilize them, but I just let hot water sit in the canning jars. Sometimes I run the jars through the dishwasher before starting to make jam, which gets them clean and leaves them hot.

Wash, hull and cut into quarters 1 quart of strawberries. That is two of those little green plastic containers full of berries. Note that this is a heaping quart cup. There is a lot of air space in there, and jam making isn’t an exact science. You can see the grated lemon peel just under the letter G in glass.

Put the berries, lemon juice and grated lemon peel into at least a 2-quart pan (3-quart size is better since it has a tendency to boil over in a 2-quart pot.) Add four cups of white sugar to the strawberries. Stir over medium heat to dissolve sugar.

The sugar is still not quite dissolved in this photo. All of the liquid is from the strawberries (and the tiny bit of lemon juice).

With luck, that will be my first embedded video that was directly embedded into the post rather than going on You-tube first. It shows the jam at a rolling boil.

Cook the jam with stirring for 15-20 minutes. It doesn’t get as thick as jelly. You can drop some on a cold plate to see if it is set up as well as you want.

Turn off the heat under the berries. Skim the foam off of the jam and discard. Ladle the jam into the six 8-ounce clean, hot jars, leaving a half inch of air space at the top of the jar. Wipe the tops of the jars clean so that the lids will make a good seal. Using tongs, lift the lids and rings out of the boiling water and place them on top of the jars. Screw down to form a tight seal. Process the jars for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath. Remove jars and set on a towel to cool. After a while, the lids will pop down, indicating a good seal. After the jars are cool, label the jars and store in a cool, dark place.

Six lovely jars of homemade strawberry jam.

Uh oh, I forgot to skim the foam off. You can see the whitish foam in the jars. That isn’t mold, it’s just foam. Also, my fruit floated. These are considered technical flaws. These jars won’t win any prizes at the county fair on appearance, but the preserves sure taste great on a homemade biscuit.

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Harvest Monday May 21, 2012 and a peek at future harvests

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

I enjoy photographing things when they are still growing more than harvested produce, so as usual my photos are heavy on plants in the ground vs harvested ones in the trug. But I’ll lead off with some harvest shots.

My last red cabbage split, but it tasted wonderful fried up with an onion and some German sausages. Seems that the artichokes all got ripe at once, but they tasted great cut fresh from the plant and plopped into boiling water. Dipped the leaves and heart into lemon butter. Oh, my. Heavenly.

This is what a perfectly ripe avocado should look like. I like to squeeze lemon juice into the avocado, sprinkle on some sea salt, and eat it with a spoon. I’m down to the last 9 avocados on the tree, with only one new fruit set that I can find. It looks like I won’t have the wonderful abundance of avocados next year that I’ve enjoyed this year.

Our avocado has finished blooming. This tiny avocado is the only one that I can find. It won’t be ready to harvest until next January. I’m hoping that there are more avocados hidden among the leaves.

Oops, I nearly forgot to photograph my first harvest of bok choy from my new raised bed. I pull the outer leaves rather than the entire plant so that I can extend the harvest from my six plants.

I see that I neglected to photograph the peach harvest. I got over four pounds, but they are small, so nearly half of that is pit and skin. I spent a long time preparing the fruit for a peach dumpling recipe from a Smoky Mountain cookbook. Sadly, the recipe turned out awful!

There was obviously a mistake in the cookbook because it said the dough would be stiff. But it made a runny batter, not a thick dough. I added more flour, but the dumplings cooked up like paste. Or maybe glue. The fruit sauce was tasty, but I ended up feeding the dumplings to the hens. They loved them. What do they know?

Our Santa Rosa plums are nearing harvest size. They will turn deep purple before they’re ready to pick. We have a large tree, but only four plums on it.

Our Katy apricots are also nearing harvest. We have four of them. Not a great year for either plums or apricots in our yard.

Our very small August Pride peach tree set only three peaches this year, but it looks like they will be large ones. I didn’t photograph the Babcock Improved peaches, but that tree set quite a few peaches. They will be the last ones to be harvested.

The Snow Queen nectarine is still blooming, but so far about a dozen nectarines have set. The Panamint nectarines are nearing harvest, maybe 30 of them.

The fruit set on our Granny Smith dwarf apple has been pathetic so far. There are still a few more blooms, so maybe we’ll get more. The honey bees have been noticeably absent from our yard this spring. I was happy to see several of them today, so there is still time to get some apples fertilized.

The Granny Smith apple tree is almost done blooming, but the Gala and Fuji trees are just beginning. It was a warm winter here, so there may not have been enough hours of chill for the Gala to set fruit. It requires a few more hours chilling than the Fuji or Granny Smith. Sadly, neither of my Asian pear trees got enough chilling to set fruit this year. Darn global warming.

The Fuyu persimmon tree appears to have set four fruit. The brown part is the dried petals of the inconspicuous flower. The swollen green part under it is the ovary, soon to become a persimmon I hope. The green “petals” behind the tiny fruit are actually the sepals. Last year I had one fruit, and it fell off at about this stage, so I’m not counting on a harvest quite yet.

I just finished planting two self-watering planters with Sequoia strawberries. They are June-bearing rather than ever-bearing. I may have planted them too late to get much of a harvest this year. We’ll see. I’m out of space in the yard, so this is one more thing that I’m growing in my driveway.

The first tendrils on my Cherokee Trail of Tears beans have reached the netting and are starting to curl up the string. Once they do that, the vines really take off and grow. This is another of my space-saving techniques, using this useless little strip of dirt by the gas meter to grow crops.

The raised beds in back look like a jungle, not that I’m complaining. It’s mostly tomatoes and peppers, with some kale, leeks, Brussels sprouts that aren’t making any sprouts, etc.

My tomatoes are beginning to set fruit. This is a Mortgage Lifter.

This is a new variety for me, Box Car Willie, named after a country singer of the 1930s. Such a cool name. I hope they taste good. The only other tomato to set fruit so far is a Black Plum, another new variety for me.

My second crop of Mammoth Snow Peas for the year has begun to flower. My Super Sugar Snaps aren’t far enough along yet to flower.

It is going to be touch and go if I get any Grandpa Admire lettuce. Out of 23 sprouts, this is the only one to survive. Either insects or drought got all but three. Then a neighborhood cat used my raised bed as a litter box and killed the other two. Such is gardening.

This misshapen, misbegotten thing is supposed to be a Golden Bell pepper. It has a long way to go before it is ready to harvest.

This is one of the mystery pumpkins or winter squash that sprouted from my compost pile. I transplanted it and will let it grow for a while. I should at least get some squash blossoms from it. To save space, I like to let my winter squash climb up a tomato cage. Works for butternut squash. Probably won’t work for a heavier pumpkin.

Our semi-dwarf navel orange tree has set fruit. It looks like we’ll have a good crop next winter. I still have a few more oranges left to harvest from this year’s crop, but they’re about gone.

This appears to be full bloom for grapes. Not very impressive. But I’m excited to be growing my first grapes. It took the vines 3-4 years to get large enough to bloom, and this will be my first crop.

These green bunching onions have just sprouted. If you look closely, you can still see the black seed covers. I grow green onions in pots due to lack of yard space.

Our last three artichokes. We had them for dinner tonight.

I planted a fourth fabric container of yams yesterday, plus two containers of Japanese eggplant. The potatoes in the fourth container back from the front are nearing harvest. They’re either blue or German butterball.

New raised bed in front.

Redhead radish

Kyoto red carrots

Cucumbers, either Tendergreen Burpless or Straight Eight. I can hardly wait for cucumber soup.

I’m working now on the bare area to the back right of my new raised bed. I plan to put in some tomatoes and pole beans there, with pumpkins on a small lower terrace out of sight in this picture.

A pretty pink rose.

This is the first year that this variety of iris has bloomed for me. It has been a really good year for irises in my yard.

That completes the photo tour of my garden. On to this week’s harvest.

FRUIT

1 lb Avocados

10 oz Lemon, Eureka

4 lbs 8 oz Peaches, Florida Prince

Subtotal fruit 6 lbs 2 oz

VEGETABLES

2 lbs 10 oz Artichokes

7 oz Bok Choy

1 lb 4 oz Cabbage, Red

1 oz Onion, Green

Subtotal Vegetables 4 lbs 6 oz

TOTAL PRODUCE 10 lbs 8 oz plus 11 eggs

If you had a harvest, or to see what others are harvesting, visit Daphne’s Dandelions.

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Kitchen Cupboard Thursday and making Lemon Marmalade

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

Since I started the 2012 canning season with pickled beets in February and a batch of lemon-ginger marmalade last week, I thought I’d take stock of my cupboard of remaining home-canned foods.

Ingredients for Lemon-Ginger Marmalade: 4 Meyer lemons, one navel orange and fresh ginger the size of a walnut. All of these are organic and from my garden.

I have remaining:

2 pints, Beets, Pickled

5- 8 oz jars, Green Beans, Dilly

3- 8 oz jars, Jam, Guava Spice

3- 8 oz jars, Jam, Strawberry

4- 16 oz jars Marinara Sauce

7- 8oz jars, Marmalade, Meyer Lemon-Ginger

1- 8 oz jar, Pickles, Bread and Butter

1- gallon jar, Pickles, Dill Spears

6 – 8 oz jars, Pickles, Watermelon

3- 12 oz jars, Pickles, Watermelon

1- 16 oz jar, Soup, Tomato

That’s 35 jars of canned stuff, not counting the gallon of dill pickles in the refrigerator. My freezer inventory is less precise but includes some mashed pumpkin, at least 3- 16 oz packages, maybe as many as 5, and 2 packages of snow peas.

I also have nearly two dozen eggs frozen in two-egg packets. I lightly mix the eggs, add a bit of salt, and freeze them in small ZipLoc baggies, 2 eggs to a baggie. Since I know that my hens stop laying in winter, I now have some eggs put by to tide me over November-January until they begin laying again.

My latest batch of Meyer Lemon-Ginger Marmalade was fabulous, but I’ll never be able to duplicate it. Here is what I did. This is certainly not a “how-to” because of, well, you’ll see.

Peel the brown outer skin off a walnut-sized piece of fresh ginger, and grate with a microplane grater.

You’ll end up with about 1.5 tsp of grated ginger.

Using a citrus zester or parer like this one, pare the peel off the 4 lemons and 1 orange. Dice the peel and add to the ginger. Using a paring knife, peel off the white part of the rind and discard. That is the bitter part, and eliminating it makes the marmalade less bitter. Dice the peeled lemon and orange and add to the ginger and zest along with water and sugar. See below.

Now here is where I screwed up. I was supposed to either soak the seeds and/or the entire diced lemons in water overnight. I think that is where the pectin comes from. You need pectin to gel the marmalade. Because I didn’t do that, I decided to modify the recipe and use packaged pectin. But if you use packaged pectin, you add less water and more sugar. So here is what I did. The juice etc. added up to a little over 3 cups. I added water to make 4 cups, then added another cup of water. I cooked the juice etc for an hour, then added 6 cups of sugar, which is more than what my original recipe (without added pectin) called for. I also added a packet of pectin. However, it was 15 years old, and I’m not sure it was any good. The marmalade was supposed to gel within two minutes, but it took another hour of boiling for it to gel. The final product was wonderful, with perfect taste and consistency. Too bad I’ll never be able to do this again exactly the same way.

Cook the marmalade until it sheets off a spoon in one sheet rather than in two separate drops. Put in hot, sterile canning jars, seal and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes. Place on a cloth towel to cool. Label and store.

So that was my adventure in making marmalade. To see how others are using their harvests or stored produce visit Robin at The Gardener of Eden.

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Harvest Monday May 14, 2012

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

The weather here in southern California is gorgeous today. There is a hint of humidity in the air and I can smell the ocean and earth and spring outside. Delightful.

Drifts of beautiful pink Mexican poppies are nodding in the breeze in our front yard. They self seed, and are taking over. I’m letting them grow where they want because they are so pretty.

I went to gather eggs this morning and found Henrietta on the nest. She got disturbed and stood up before I could snap her picture. Chicken Little was at the door to the coop, awaiting her turn in the nest. My three hens have four nests to choose from, but they only like to lay eggs in one of the nests. Go figure.

Two of our avocados went on top of nachos this week, made with organic blue corn tortilla chips, grated cheese, and store-bought salsa.

Should have harvested this red cabbage last week. It has split really badly, but it will still taste good fried up with an apple and served with German sausages. That’s about all I know to do with red cabbage. What do you do with yours?

I am not having good luck with my Grandpa Admire lettuce. I had 23 sprouts, but all have died or were eaten by pillbugs except for the last three seedlings. I am hoping to get at least one of these plants to maturity so I can see what this lettuce tastes like.

I have much better luck growing Black-seeded Simpson lettuce, which is my favorite kind. I will thin and transplant this tiny patch soon. My second favorite lettuce is Forellenschuss, otherwise known as Speckled Trout. I’ll have to see if I have any seeds left of that variety. It is so pretty, I can’t resist it. But my husband thinks it looks diseased because of the speckles. Go figure.

The little round things that I have been photographing turned out to be flower buds on my grapevines. These are the real flowers. If you look really, really closely, you can see stamens and pistols on the flowers. They are miniscule. I hope the bees find them or I won’t get any grapes. I worry because I haven’t see any bees lately, and my Granny Smith apple blossoms don’t seem to have been fertilized. I had more flowers on that tree than ever this spring, but so far I haven’t found even one apple set from all those flowers. It is still blooming a bit, so I’m still hopeful for fruit set.

Redhead Radish cotyledon leaves.

Tendergreen burpless cucumber cotyledon leaves. I’m also growing Straight Eight this year, a new cucumber variety for me. I hope to make some pickles this summer.

A mystery pumpkin or winter squash sprouted from the compost. It is doing so nicely, that I’m letting it grow. Probably a big mistake. We’ll see. Mammoth snow peas are growing behind the pumpkin. They will grow up my pea fence by the deck. This is my second planting of peas on this fence this year. With luck, I may be able to get in a crop of beans along this fence after the peas are done. Time will tell.

This row of Cherokee Trail of Tears beans is growing by my water meter and hose bib in a tiny strip of otherwise useless soil. I usually get a crop of peas or beans from this patch of dirt by the side of the house. I’m also growing Blue Lake Pole Beans in the raised bed in back. They are farther along than these beans, which I will use as dried black beans.

This is my rejuvenated Garden of Infinite Neglect, or my GIN garden. I may change its name to Garden of Infinite Niceness, but niceness is such a blah word. Surely I can do better than that.

Everything has recovered from transplant shock, and I’ve even had a harvest of Red Sails lettuce (because I planted them as embarassingly mature transplants last week). The cucumbers, radishes, lettuce, beets and chard have sprouted from seed. I’m waiting for the carrots to sprout next, plus the rest of the beets. If they don’t sprout, I’ll reseed.

I added fertilizer to my three-year-old strawberry jar and rejuvenated it. I may get some strawberries from it this year.

Whoops, guess who should have harvested artichokes last week? These are a bit past prime, but will still be good if I pick them today.

Our Panamint nectarine has set about 30 fruits. The Snow Queen makes even better fruit, best nectarines I’ve ever tasted. My husband wants to know how many of THOSE that we’re getting, but they are just now finishing flowering. I’m happy that they ripen at different times so we aren’t inundated with nectarines.

Speaking of inundated…. Take a look at this Florida Prince peach tree. It is absolutely loaded with fruit this year. And it is all getting ripe at once. This is certainly a case of “use it or lose it.”

The lighting wasn’t optimal for a photo of my raised beds behind the herb garden in the foreground, but I put this in anyway so you can see what a jungle they are turning into with all those tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, kale, etc. My tomatoes are flowering, but only one has set any fruit so far. I go out in the morning and flick the flowers to help them set fruit, but it doesn’t seem to be doing any good. I need some Blossom Set. That really helps the tomatoes and peppers set fruit.

And that’s my garden round-up for the week. Um, probably shouldn’t use the word round-up within earshot of my plants. They might think it was the capitalized version, which has no place in my yard. We’re all organic, safer for the bees and butterflies.

HARVEST for week ending May 13

FRUIT

5 oz Lime

1 lb 8 oz Peaches, Florida Prince

Subtotal 1 lb 13 oz Fruit

VEGETABLES

3 oz lettuce, Red Sails

TOTAL 2 lbs PRODUCE plus 11 eggs

If you had a harvest, or to see what others are harvesting, visit Daphne’s Dandelions. (See link at right.)

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200th Blog Post–Harvest Monday and Kitchen Cupboard Thursday

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

Phew, I am really running behind this week. I didn’t get my Harvest Monday post done this week, even though I had a nice harvest to report. But I did get a new raised bed constructed and planted. See my last post. At this point, I’m hoping to get my Thursday “what I used from my garden and preserved harvest” post done before midnight. And… this marks my 200th blog post.

First, a feast for the eyes, a lovely orchid cactus in bloom.

So, before I go on to my harvest and use thereof, let me direct your attention to the World Map at the right. This app keeps track of where my visitors live. My blog has been visited by people from every state in the US, and people from 182 other countries. Since I don’t think that there are even that many countries in existence, that is quite remarkable. And since my blog is in English, it makes me wonder what brings all those people here. I would guess photos. Or maybe they get here by mistake. Who knows. I just hope they find something useful or that makes them happy.

This is the largest cabbage that I’ve ever grown. It weighed 3 lbs. It split, but I cleverly didn’t show you that side of the cabbage. I have another one, the last one, ready to pick this week.

I have potatoes growing in the fabric Gro-pot at the lower right, and yams in the other two pots. I’m about to plant my third and last pot of yams from slips growing on the kitchen windowsill. This is the largest that my potato plants have ever gotten, so I am hoping for a good harvest soon.

After not producing avocados for 15 years, my Littlecado tree finally did itself proud this year. I am harvesting two a week, which is the rate at which we consume them. They don’t ripen until picked. I have maybe 9-10 left on the tree, so the harvest isn’t over yet.

Whoopee, my first harvest of the year of Florida Prince peaches. They are pathetically small because I just didn’t thin them enough. Now I am faced with tiny fruits that are mostly seed. But boy are they tasty! Sweet and succulent, dripping with juice. I had some for breakfast this morning with granola.

First, my harvest for the week.

Harvest for week ending May 6, 2012.

FRUITS

14 oz Avocados

12 oz Orange, Navel

1 lb 6 oz Peaches, Florida Prince

Subtotal 3 lbs

VEGETABLES

12 oz Artichokes

3 lbs Cabbage, Red

1 oz Lettuce, Deer Tongue

Subtotal 3 lbs 13 oz

TOTAL PRODUCE 6 lbs 13 oz plus 10 eggs

If you had a harvest, or to see what others around the world are harvesting, visit Daphne’s Dandelions. See hot links at right.

On to what I made with my harvest. I made a batch of Meyer lemon-ginger marmalade, but I’ll post the recipe for that on another post because I’m running out of time and energy. I still want to bake a peach pie tonight with some of my Florida Prince peaches.

This smoked salmon fritatta was made with eggs from my hens, avocado and green onion from my garden, sliced cheese, and some smoked salmon. Wish I had more of that salmon, because it was YUMMY. Wish I could spell frittata. Frittatta. Whatever.

I made a beef stew with cubed boneless chuck roast, diced potatoes, an onion, a bunch of carrots sliced, and a can of my homemade tomato soup. I put two bay leaves on top from our tiny potted bay laurel tree.

I cooked the stew in our Sun Oven solar oven. I just love that thing and have been using it 2-3 times a week, saving energy and fighting global warming. The stew was done and tender after 4 hours. I swear, food tastes better when it is cooked in a solar oven. The flavors blend and mingle and meats are so tender it is amazing. But now that I look at the photo, I can see that it is white and sweet potatoes that are baking in it. They were great too.

We had the stew with cornbread and orange-honey butter.

Orange-honey Butter

1 stick of butter softened in microwave for 10 seconds

1 T orange rind grated with microplane grater

2 t honey

Blend with a fork. Great on blueberry pancakes, biscuits, cornbread, English muffins, etc.

Did somebody say blueberry pancakes? That’s what we had for breakfast the other day, made with blueberries from the farmers market, topped with 100% pure maple syrup and orange-honey butter made with orange rind from my own oranges, and… orange wedges.

If you used something from your kitchen cupboard or to see recipes from others, visit Robin at The Gardener of Eden.

I am now debating whether or not I have enough energy left in the evening to bake a peach pie. Arg, I wouldn’t get it into the oven until 10 pm and it wouldn’t come out until 11. That is a “not happenin’ activity” for tonight. Manana, muchachos y muchachas.

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I built a raised garden bed by myself

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

Those of you who are tool-proficient will think nothing of this, but for this old granny, it was a major accomplishment and an adventure in using my new bag of power tools.

A few months back, I bought a set of cordless power tools so I could dismantle my lovely redwood raised beds at the community garden. But I never got around to it and the garden committee did it for me. My new tools sat untouched.

My plot at the Huntington Beach community garden had nice raised beds made of redwood. This shot was in November 2011, shortly before the beds were dismantled.

The reason why I had to remove my beautiful, one-year-old beds is that the landowner, Southern California Edison, disallowed raised beds. This has stifled my interest in gardening at the community garden so far this year.

My poor neglected community garden plot, full of weeds, with no raised bed borders. This shot was in March.

I weeded my plot, but so far haven’t planted it. I have plans to put in beans and winter squash, at the very least. But right now, all that is growing there is chard, onions, and garlic.

The nice people on the garden committee even delivered the redwood boards to our home, because I don’t have a vehicle into which the boards would fit. My plan was to build a new raised bed where my Garden of Infinite Neglect sat in front, growing no vegetables.

An aside–I work at the Orange County Conservation Corps. The exterior bed borders for our plots were built by my Corps Members last year, and those outer bed borders are allowed to remain. I swear, there is no rhyme nor reason to Edison’s rules, since my inner bed borders are exactly the same as the outer borders.

I had watched my Corps Members build the borders and it didn’t look too hard. My husband built my raised beds at the community garden with a borrowed cordless drill, and I watched him too. I was pretty sure I could do this. I had the corner brackets, the screws, and the redwood already cut into the proper length for me to build a bed in our front yard. And I had a nice cordless drill that I could use to put in the screws.

Now you might be wondering about my last post on saving energy by making sun tea, juxtaposed with this post on using power tools. Hand tools are no longer an option for me because I’m pretty much crippled with arthritis in my hands and knees. I just don’t have the strength any more to put in a screw using a hand screwdriver. However, I was intimidated by my new drill. I had used a corded drill to both drill holes and put in screws, but never a cordless drill. Well, after reading some of Bee Girl’s posts about her Tool Girl, I decided that I could do it. So Tool Girl, even though we have never met, THANK YOU for your inspiration.

Fortunately, my boards were already cut to lengths that I wanted. All I had to do was juxtapose the ends, bracing them with my foot, and drill in the screws. Piece of cake. You can see that these are reused boards by the old drill marks.

My husband carried the heavy bags of compost to the raised bed and dumped them for me.

I filled the beds with a mixture of what Miracle-Gro calls organic garden soil (looked like sawdust and wood chips to me), potting soil, and steer manure, then dug it in well, mixing in dirt from below the bed. This bed is 12 ft long and 3 ft wide.

This is the new bed looking from the other direction. The Lacinato and Scotch Blue-curled kale were left over from last year. Ditto the chard at the other end. I uprooted the rest of the chard and kale and fed it to my chickens.

I drilled deck screws into the tops of the boards at one foot intervals, and threaded string around them to delineate foot square grids. I did this in part to facilitate square foot gardening, and in part (I hope) to discourage neighborhood cats from using my raised bed as a litter box. The cucumber trellises are from Gardeners Supply Company.

This bed is my rejuvenated Garden of Infinite Neglect. It has languished for a couple of years, sadly neglected. I thought for a while about why that is, and decided that it is because the hose doesn’t reach and watering it is very ackward and unsatisfying. Well, there was a solution to that problem. I bought a longer hose! And a nice watering nozzle. Problem solved. (I hope.)

I planted some almost-ready-to-harvest transplants of Red Sails lettuce and Joi Choy Pak Choy (the same as bok choy?). Being an impatient sort and having gotten a late start on the season, I planted basil, yellow crookneck and yellow straightneck summer squash, and butternut squash from transplants instead of seeds. I know, shame on me. Squash are so easy to grow from seeds. The marigolds are also transplants.

I planted seeds of Tendergreen Burpless and Straight Eight cucumbers, Black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Scarlet Runner Beans, Lutz Greenleaf beets, Kyoto Red carrots, and Redhead radishes. I think that I planted some things too close together (like the summer squash), even though I have a string grid to go by. Oh well. I grow a Darwinian garden. Survival of the fittest.

I still have a few more garden chores to do at home, and then I will tackle my community garden plot. Spring is still springing at our house.

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How to make sun tea

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

There are so many different ways to save energy. Making sun tea is just one of them. Frankly, I think it tastes better too.

It couldn’t be easier.

Find a nice lidded quart container, like a glass canning jar. I use antique blue Ball jars that I inherited from my grandmother. I suspect these jars date back to the 1930s.

Place two tea bags normally used to make one cup of hot tea into a quart of water at room temperature..

Fill the jar with room temperature tap water. If you want to take out the organics and chlorine, you can use water that has been through a Brita filter. Not necessary, but again, I think it tastes better. Add two tea bags. Let the jar sit for a couple of hours. It doesn’t have to be in the sun at all. I love the way the afternoon sun filters through the blue jars, so I set mine on the windowsill.

After about two hours, you have tea.

You can pour the iced tea over ice cubes if you want to drink it right away, or chill it in the refrigerator for later.

I like to add a sprig of mint from my garden. I could add a lemon wedge, since I have lemons growing in the garden, but I rarely do. I drink my tea unsweetened, but you can add sugar if that is your preference.

Before I started using this method, I would heat water on the stove (or in the microwave in more recent years) before adding the tea bags. The tea brewed quickly, but then it took a long time to cool down. It takes energy to both heat water and make ice, so the less heat and ice that is used, the more energy saved. Every little bit matters.

Why? Well, dams are silting up and water levels are dropping in the lakes behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams. If the water levels fall too far, those dams will stop producing electricity. With global climate change and drought, snow levels are decreasing in the Rockies and Eastern Sierras, which means less runoff, which means less energy produced by those dams. Coal-fired plants put pollutants (including carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere. Nuclear powered plants produce hazardous waste and are limited in the number of years that they can operate. I just don’t think that they are safe.

We can’t afford solar panels on our roof, in part because we use so little electricity that we don’t qualify for rebates.  We try to conserve energy and reduce our carbon footprint however we can. Making sun tea is just one tiny bit of what we do in our fight to save Mother Earth.

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Harvest Monday, April 30 2012

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Lou Murray, Ph.D.

Where is the time going? It’s going to be May tomorrow and I’m sooooo far behind in my planting. I have done nothing with either the community garden (other than weed it) or the Garden of Infinite Neglect.  At least the back is planted. I guess that’s something. The older I get, the slower I go.

My harvest photos this week are going to focus on beauty, a harvest for the soul. I didn’t pick and eat these things, I just enjoyed them in the yard, which is one purpose of my garden. I love watching things grow and change.

These two pretty boys came to our front yard last week, attracted by the pond.

I gave them some chicken feed, and made them happy. They stayed a couple of days and moved on.

This is one of three colors of Douglas iris in our yard, part of our native California plant garden.

My bearded iris are doing well this year, first year most of my varieties are blooming. It takes them a couple of years to get established before they bloom, at least for me.

I like this pale one. My husband prefers the traditional all purple ones.

This is a blue iris with white centers. So pretty.

That was my visual feast for the soul. Now for some future food.

Having never grown grapes before, I'm fascinated by the flowering process. I think that these are flower buds that haven't opened. It took three years for my grapevines to make grapes. Well, technically these aren't grapes yet, but I'm hopeful.

My Florida Prince peach is the earliest to produce of my stone fruit trees. Some of the peaches are almost edible size, but most are still really small. They're still hard, so they will grow a bit more before harvest time. I see some peach preserves, peach pie, peach cobbler, peaches on cereal, and peaches in ice cream in our near future. Our Babcock peach tree has set about 50 fruit this year, but the August Pride set only three peaches. It's still a tiny tree.

The Panamint nectarine tree shown here has 30-40 nectarines that are looking good. The Snow Queen has even better tasting nectarines, and has more blooms on it this year than ever. It lags way behind the Panamint, so I'll have a staggered crop.

I'm really excited about these Grandpa Admire lettuce seedlings. I got a pack of this variety, a speckled Romaine, from Seed Savers Exchange. But my plantings of it failed in 2010 and 2011. I figured that the seeds were no good, and planted all of the rest of the packet this year even though they were 3 years old and had never germinated for me. Whoopee, I got 18 seedlings sprouted. I will be transplanting them to give them more room. Maybe I'll finally get to see what this lettuce tastes like and with luck save some seeds for next year.

That’s my garden status update for this week.  Here is my veggie and fruit harvest for the week.

FRUIT

2 lbs 2 oz Meyer lemons

2 oz lime

Subtotal 2 lbs 4 oz fruit

VEGETABLES

23 oz artichokes

2 oz ginger

1 oz green onions

Subtotal 1 lb 10 oz vegetables

TOTAL 3 lbs 14 oz produce plus 13 eggs

The lemons and ginger are going into a lemon-ginger marmalade. If I ever get a ROUND TUIT.

To see what others are harvesting this week, visit Daphne’s Dandelions.

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